04 Dec / Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge: Two Novellas of Japan’s 3/11 Disaster by Kimura Yūsuke, translated by Doug Slaymaker [in Booklist]
Kimura Yūsuke makes his Anglophoned debut with two haunting novellas that are slight in length yet dense with meaning, enhancing the growing genre of post-3/11 literature in response to the catastrophic March 11, 2011, Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Translator Doug Slaymaker augments the genre’s accessibility, having previously rendered Hideo Furukawa’s post-3/11 Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (2016). Slaymaker’s thorough afterword here provides an illuminating discussion of Kimura’s literary history, the sociopolitical context of the three-part tragedy, and the challenges of converting a specific local dialect into English.
In both novellas, Kimura adroitly presents everyday human challenges in the midst of unfathomable disaster: in Sacred Cesium Ground, a woman trapped in an abusive marriage leaves Tokyo to volunteer at “the Fortress of Hope,” a renegade sanctuary (resembling a real-life ranch) for surviving irradiated cows. In Isa’s Deluge, an unemployed Tokyo editor returns home for his middle-school reunion to find the small fishing village, including his own troubled family, angrily struggling to navigate a post-cataclysmic future. Kimura’s novellas offer a piercing portrait of the abandoned and forgotten.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, December 1, 2018
Readers: Adult
Published: 2019 (United States)